Mistress Murder (7 page)

‘It's nice to have you at home at the weekend, Paul.'

The Jacobs family were at home, enjoying tea at the fireside of their Cardiff home. A wicked east wind howled outside and the shaking trees in the garden added to the comfort of being inside.

‘Old Ben can look after the shop till Monday,' he drawled in reply. ‘We never do much on a Friday afternoon.'

Paul's legitimate business was in a lock-up shop near the docks, where an aged, but experienced, assistant ran the sales during Paul's frequent trips to London to ‘buy stock.'

He leant back comfortably against the arm of the settee and looked across at his wife.

She was a calm woman of his own age, by no means glamorous but with considerable character. He had met her in London six years before, when he ran a similar business in Finsbury as a cover for the same smuggling racket. She was a schoolteacher and, by some magic of compatibility, he soon found that he wanted to marry her.

He had a mistress at that time, but his knack of running a double life was already well developed and he found this no bar to a rapid courtship.

His wife wanted to go back to her home in Wales and, as this suited his Jekyll and Hyde existence very well, he sold up and started a shop in Cardiff. At first heavily subsidised from his smuggling, he found to his surprise that after a year or two it began to break even and now was actually paying its way.

His wife had no idea of his other life or of his true identity. She was not over-inquisitive, one of the factors that attracted him to her. She realised that he was of foreign origin, but his carefully prepared story of being an Austrian who had fled the country in 1938 and spent the war in the British Merchant Navy satisfied her completely.

He stretched his feet to the fire and prodded the dog with a toe.

‘Better off here than Glasgow, this time last week,' he lied easily.

His wife looked up, her grey eyes looking steadily from a long face free of any make-up.

‘Why Glasgow all of a sudden? I thought you did all your buying in London.'

Paul nodded lazily.

‘Until now … a new firm has opened up there, a few points lower in price, so it's worth my while going up to get the edge on the London values.'

He was building up a cover for the future. Now that his usual routine was threatened by the unknown man on the tape, he might need more time away. It was better to prepare the ground beforehand than to make lame excuses later.

The domestic bliss went on undisturbed. With his knack of being able to produce a voluntary schizophrenia, Paul was able to shut his mind at will to the sordid other half of his life. When he was in Cardiff, he really was a respectable antique dealer with a nice respectable house in a select district, a cultured and utterly respectable wife, and a few respectable friends in the local golf club.

The only contact that Jacobs allowed between his two lives were the dates of his next visits to London and the judicious transfusion of his local bank account with illegal money.

Since coming back to Cardiff on the Tuesday, he had spent every day at the shop. He had not bothered to look in his newspaper, rightly presuming that no national daily would bother to report a solitary fatal road accident.

He was confident that no suspicion of foul play would arise and that he could safely reappear in the West End without feeling the heavy hand of the law to fall on his shoulder.

The tremendous crunch he had heard when the speeding Sunbeam had hit the parapet of the bridge on Cuckoo Hill told him that it must certainly be a complete wreck, and that Rita's body had shared in the destruction.

He had rather hoped that the car would have caught fire, but even so, he expected that the injuries to the body would be so severe as to completely confuse the issue, if it was ever raised. Perhaps he would have been less complacent at his fireside if he had known that the police were at that very moment arranging with the Home Office for the exhumation of his late mistress.

Conrad Draper sat at his tycoon-size desk and scanned through the lists of accounts from his betting shops. Saturday morning was a time of reckoning, when he could assess his takings for the week. This was when he kicked out his branch managers who were falling by the wayside and when the ‘black spot' was put on clients who were winning too much or too often. Occasionally, he used Saturday morning to pick out the customers who needed his strong-arm boys to call on them to encourage them to hurry up with their debts.

The importance of this routine had driven even the matter of Paul Golding from his head for an hour or two. All the week, Draper had harried Irish O'Keefe for more information on the mysterious drug merchant of Newman Street, but so far, he had turned nothing up of any use.

Plenty of people, especially around Gerrard Street, knew Golding by sight, but very few had any idea that he was a drug runner. No one knew where he went when he left Soho, in spite of all Irish's efforts to wheedle information from the junkies and pushers of the district.

They did no direct business with Golding; he was strictly a wholesaler and never risked the dangers of dealing with a host of small-time traders, who were notorious for their unreliability.

It was on this Saturday morning, when the boss was absorbed in his gambling statistics, that Irish had his first break. O'Keefe tapped on the door of the inner sanctum and slid in like a wraith. He was standing in front of the desk before Conrad realised that he was there. The pouch-eyed bookie jerked his head up in surprise.

‘Don't you ever bloody-well knock, Irish,' he rasped. ‘What d'you want?'

The little man's mouth cracked open into a grin, exposing a ragged line of yellow teeth.

‘I did it, boss, I got a bloke outside. I think he knows something about Golding.'

Draper slammed his accounts folder shut and stood up quickly.

‘Does he know who he is? Show him in – fast.'

Irish shook his head sorrowfully.

‘He don't know who he is, nor where he goes, but he may know something that might tell you that you're in a bit of a spot.'

Conrad reddened. His coarsely handsome face, thickened by fighting and whisky, scowled down at his sidekick.

‘Cut the innuendo, Irish.' He was proud of this word, gleaned from an old movie the week before.

O'Keefe sidetracked into his favourite topic: money.

‘It'll cost a few nicker to get him squealing. I had to slip him a fiver to get him as far as this.'

Draper slammed the desk and made the telephones tinkle.

‘All right, all right, you flaming Dublin crook, you'll get it back. Now wheel him in before I flatten your earholes.'

Irish slithered through the door and reappeared with a skinny young man in a bright blue suit. He had long sideburns and a weak receding chin.

‘This is Alfie Day,' announced Irish proudly, as if he was presenting a child prodigy. ‘He keeps that radio shop in Piper's Court.'

Conrad scowled at the seedy electrician without enthusiasm.

‘What d'you lug him up here for?'

Alfie looked uneasily from one to the other.

‘I heard that Irish was asking around about Golding … I wondered if a bit of info was worth any bunce to you. I was told to keep my trap shut, mind. I might get the sticky end if he finds out.'

‘Depends on what you got to tell me,' grunted Draper.

The radio dealer smiled weakly. ‘I thought it might be worth a pony,' he said hopefully. His voice trailed off as he saw the expression on Draper's face.

‘Twenty-five! Go and get stuffed, mate. Say your piece and I'll see if I can squeeze you out a fiver.'

‘I don't exactly know anything about him – personally – but I did a job for him … he said I was to keep quiet about it.'

Conrad's expression spurred him to carry on quickly.

‘He came to me a few months back and asked me to fit a tape recorder to the telephone in this dame's flat – the one that copped it last weekend. It was a cagey job – I had to do it all inside a couple of hours when she was out of the place. He gave me a key and said he'd keep her out of the way long enough for me to fix it up.'

Conrad felt a cold lump grow in the pit of his stomach. ‘What then?' he said hollowly.

‘I had to make a false bottom in a cupboard for it, and connect the recorder to the telephone junction box in the bedroom.'

Draper's icy patch spread across his middle. He wasn't sure what all this meant, but he felt that it wasn't good for his health. ‘Go on!' he said between his teeth.

‘Not much more to it,' answered Alfie. ‘The motor was wired so that it started to run as soon as the receiver was lifted on the phone. It was transistorised, so it didn't need to warm up – it was ready to go straight away – wouldn't miss a word.'

The betting shop magnate thought for a moment.

‘Was this a two-way gadget – could it pick up both callers' voices?'

Alfie nodded. ‘Oh, yes … there was an extra big spool fitted so that it would run for over an hour if needed. Golding said that he might have to leave it a couple of weeks at a time.' He looked hopefully at Conrad. ‘That's all.'

The big man ignored his hint for a reward.

‘How did Golding get on to you? Did he know you before?'

‘No, Ray Silver in the Nineties Club recommended me – I'd just done some work on the microphones there.'

‘And you don't know anything about this Golding? Did he say where he was from or anything else at all about himself?'

The man in the awful suit shook his head vigorously.

‘Nah, he was as tight as a bleeding oyster. Didn't say a dicky bird. He told me what to do, gave me the lolly afterwards and told me to screw my mouth down … I'm taking a risk grassing to you, mister, straight I am.' He ended on a whine.

Conrad stood up, peeled a couple of blue notes off his roll, and gave them to the electrician.

‘Right, shove off. You needn't worry about Golding; it's me you want to think about. If you drop a whisper of this to anybody, I'll have your shop turned into a junkyard, right?'

Alfie understood only too well and vanished in record time with his ten pounds clutched in his fist.

When he had gone, Conrad seemed in a better humour.

‘Irish, we're going to pay a call on Ray Silver tonight. That slanty-eyed swine has been in with Golding and I didn't know it.'

Chapter Six

Though the rain had stopped late on the Friday night, Oldfield cemetery was little better than a quagmire in the early hours of the next morning.

At six o'clock, it was still pitch dark when a plain blue van drove up to the ornate gates set in the stone wall. A man – a council gravedigger – got out and unlocked the gates in the beam of the van's headlights.

The vehicle passed through and made its way along narrow tarmac roads until it reached the newest graves in one comer. Nearby was a wooden hut. Two more men got down and fetched spades, poles, and canvas from it before trudging through the squelching turf to the most recent burial plot.

Working with their gumboots already plastered in red earth, they erected a screen from the hessian and posts, before starting to remove the fresh soil from the grave. They laboured by the light of two paraffin lamps hung on the poles. The harsh shadows and silhouettes made an eerie pattern as the two undertaker's men watched them from the cab of the van.

The top layers were hard going but, by the time the first flush of grey light appeared in the sky, they had got down to the drier soil and the going was easier.

After this, there was only room for one man at a time in the hole and they took it in turns. The two undertakers ambled over to watch the last stages, and by seven o'clock they saw the spade thumping on the top of the coffin.

A few moments later, the diggers were able to rub the mud from the brass plate and confirm that the box held the last remains of Rita Laskey.

They came up for a quick smoke, then went back to clear the soil from the sides sufficiently to pass two ropes around the coffin. The ends were brought up to the graveside and after a few experimental pulls to make sure that enough earth had been taken out, the workers relaxed.

At exactly seven thirty, the yellow beam of headlights swept through the gates and a black Wolseley drew up behind the van. Sergeant Burrell and a thin man in a raincoat came over to the little group.

The gravediggers touched their caps to the man in plain clothes.

‘Morning, Mr Phelps, we've got 'er ready.'

Their boss, the council surveyor, had come to identify the grave to the police sergeant. He took a rolled plan from his coat and studied it by the light of a pressure lamp.

‘Laskey … number nine-two-six. That's the eighteenth in the second row beyond the north roadway.'

He walked down the path with a torch wavering in his hand, counting the headstones and the pathetic heaps of earth.

‘That's it, sergeant – that's nine-two-six all right.'

Burrell grunted. He was no great one for getting up in the morning and to be dragged out at six o'clock to take the borough surveyor to a sodden cemetery was no great stimulus to his conversation.

‘Get her up, then,' he said shortly to the workman.

They and the two undertakers tailed onto the ropes and with some grunting and squelching, the coffin came free from the grave's muddy bottom. They hauled it up level with the surface and swung its end onto a plank which had been laid across the head of the pit. One of the men slid another plank under the other end and, with the weight taken, they removed the ropes and stood back.

‘Better check the plate yourself, sarge,' suggested one of the diggers. He leant over and rubbed the metal with a rag.

Burrell held his torch close and peered at the brass oblong. ‘Rita Maria Laskey … At rest … eighteenth of November, nineteen-sixty-four,' he read aloud. ‘OK lads, take it away – up to the hospital.'